


Interlūdium

by ShadowsLament



Series: Will You Haunt Me (To Set Us Both Free) [4]
Category: Daredevil (TV), The Punisher (TV 2017)
Genre: Hugo (Dog), M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2020-05-28
Packaged: 2020-12-09 08:55:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20992139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShadowsLament/pseuds/ShadowsLament
Summary: Scenes set between the other chapters of the series.III. Let Faith Be My ShieldWritten for Day 4 of FrattWeek, for the prompt 'Faith'.





	1. I. Crouched, Parched Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't want to presume anyone has necessarily read my other fics (Outta My Head, maybe, or Don't Leave Me Hanging), but if you _have_ read one or both of those, and if you've lately gifted me with a comment, thank you. Truly, thank you. I think about and revisit those comments often. Consider this piece my attempt at reestablishing my hold on Frank's voice, and Matt's, so that I can get back to and finish Don't Leave Me Hanging.

When he'd gotten a hand in Matt's hair, Frank hadn’t thought he'd come away from the grip with paint like sand sifted into the cracked skin of his knuckles. "What's this about?”

Coiling Hugo’s leash around a scuffed-up and scratched tin of black polish on the counter, Matt set a hip against the sink, slipped his head slantwise into a peel of muted moonlight. “This being what?”

Frank looked up from his hand, up into fathomless eyes. “You tellin’ me you can’t smell the paint?”

Matt's arched eyebrow had a fair point.

With a roughened thumb pad pressed to Matt’s jaw, Frank turned his man’s head. Scratched at the set of pale freckles Matt had acquired after leaving the apartment that morning. “Where’d it come from?” More paint stood in the stubble shadowing Matt’s throat. Beads of soft cream balanced on the wind-chilled shell of his ear. His collar—both shirt and jacket—might’ve been mottled pelts, they bore so many spots. “You been walking around with this shit on your nose all day or what?”

One curious fingertip was nearly there, an inch or so away from his nose, before Matt caught the tease by the tail end and shook his head. Airborne, Frank had seen plenty of rivers take a bend that broke for the sun, bodies of water lit like wicks. Those shivering currents and the curving shift of Matt’s mouth burned brighter, warmer, than just about any other thing Frank had ever seen.

The smile Matt wore widened, like he’d worked out its effect, knew Frank would follow that light into any day, any darkness. Blisters could wholly consume Frank’s lips, his tongue, if it meant—“The rectory is being repainted.” 

“Yeah?” Frank skimmed one of Matt’s dimples with a bruise-blackened fingernail. “Did any of it get on the walls?”

“As far as I could see.”

Frank snorted and moved to stand beside Matt, opening the tap, taking up a bar of soap that was supposed to smell like linen. Thing was, if he’d ever caught a whiff of that material before it took on the color of char, before it was so much ash on a sill or the ground, he wouldn’t know it. Wouldn’t be able to pick or point it out. Rubbing at the suds and stray flecks of paint on his palm, he bumped Matt’s elbow with his own. “Gonna shower before we head out?”

“If the alternative is being mistaken for a Dalmatian—“

“What’d be wrong with that? Dals are damn good dogs. Smart, loyal.”

“We already have a dog.” Matt grabbed a towel, wrapped the worn terrycloth around Frank’s left hand. Blotted, dried. Lingered at Frank’s wrist, over his pulse. “Did you ever play connect the dots when you were a kid?”

“Sure did,” Frank offered his other hand: wet, if only just. “I’d get bored real fucking quick and poke a bunch of holes in the paper.” Once Matt was done, Frank tugged the towel from his hand, tossed it over the faucet’s spout. “Guess even then I liked to ruin nice things.” His gaze dropped from a series of dots strung along Matt’s cheekbone, held tight on his mouth. Lowering his head to get that little bit closer to the light of Matt’s grin, that indulgent heat, Frank murmured, “Go on. Get the water running. I’ll be right there.”

It was the gust of Matt’s breath that reached across the slight distance. The soft slip and slick of those unrepentant lips that caused Frank to see the kitchen through the lens of a quake survivor. Vaguely aware of Hugo’s tail smacking his knee as the dog turned and trotted into the living room after Matt, Frank reached back with both hands to grasp the sink’s cold ledge.

He’d take a minute, just one, he figured, to let any residual tremors run off.

“Goddamn.” To his own ears the word was more vowel than not. He cleared his throat and pushed away from the sink, cleared the kitchen. Following a familiar path, grabbing the book he’d left on the couch’s arm, Frank glanced at Matt’s suit, discarded on their bed, and nodded at Hugo where the dog had curled around Matt’s pillow. Cutting a slit through steam standing like a fifth wall in the bathroom, Frank paused near enough to the middle of the space. Passed the book from hand to hand. “Matty, I…”

“Hmm?”

Earlier, waiting on Matt, Frank had taken a brush to his boots until they shone, but the years the leather had trespassed through were visible at the heel, in the fading black around the toe, down near the chewed-up sole. The drawn shower curtain was midnight, was onyx, in comparison. Every so many seconds it fluttered, moving with Matt, with the water striking out any chance of silence. “I, ah, got our book here. I could read. Or if you wanna tell me about—”

“Did you remember to mark the page this time?”

“You remember why I didn’t that last time?”

Matt’s voice came across like the steam thickening the air. “The moral of that particular story: don’t deep throat Frank Castle while he’s reading. Speaking of, you did restock the first aid kit, I hope. In case of future paper cuts.”

Frank unloosed something like a grin, a crack of negligible pain opening up in his lip, running straight through a day-old split. “I’d take a bullet over one of those, I’ll tell you that.”

A short, light laugh. A splash of water Frank imagined Matt had let well up in cupped hands, had probably used on his face to rid himself of those fresh, faint freckles. “Well?"

"Well what?”

"Are you reading or—“

"Yeah," Frank swallowed, "yeah," and opened up the book. "I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine, in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze—" Frank read on, holding the cadence of the poem's upcoming lines in one ear, the other tuned into the play of water against tile and the drain's beaten metal, and beneath that, the occasional rougher, deeper note of Matt's breathing. "There you are on the bed, like a gift, like a touchable dream.”

Finished, that last line lingering in his mouth, Frank saw that the shower curtain was still. The water's rhythmic pitch unrelenting, unbroken.

"Matty?" Frank put the slim, sliced-spine volume of poetry down on the toilet's closed lid. "You good?"

"I met someone.”

After a long, ringing second, Frank eased his hand open, out of its curled clench. Smeared blood that had seeped up from the new, violent fault lines notched into his knuckles onto his jeans. He exhaled, finally, staring at the unmoving curtain, at an empty night sky’s impenetrable black. “And?"

"And," Matt's tone was a shrug, slight enough to nearly go unnoticed, "I don't know. It didn’t last long, our conversation, but it felt like I…”

Words like rust, sharp and scraping, clung onto Frank’s throat. There wasn’t enough spit in his mouth to do a damn thing about smoothing their way into sound. He barely bit out, “What?”

The shower cut off. The curtain twitched before the material folded map-like, slid all the way over to one side. Unseeing eyes found Frank, water letting go of his brow darkening Matt’s lashes. He held out a dripping hand. “Come here.” The puddle gathering on the floor between them spread out some. Matt sighed. “Frank.” His hand didn’t retract, no matter that the rapidly cooling air turned the skin on the back of it into a page of braille. “Please.”

Frank breathed in deep, stepped forward. Matt’s hand rose when Frank didn’t take it; he pressed his palm against the pocket on the flannel Frank wore, against an unreconciled heartbeat. Frank repeated the one word, “What?”

“Her name’s Maggie,” Matt softly said, “she’s a nun. She oversees a shelter near the church, helping with kids who…With kids.” He hesitated, his fingers contracting and unfolding, no doubt wrinkling the dampened material beneath them. “I…That was the first time I’d talked to her, but she seemed so…I liked her. She reminded me of you, a little.”

Frank’s stare narrowed. “How’s that?” 

His lips quirked, Matt said, “She speaks her mind, for better or worse. She’s…formidable. Unstoppable, I think, in her own way.”

Like the water steadily drawing down from Matt’s collarbones, a solid measure of tension slipped from Frank’s shoulders. Leaning in, splaying his hand over the one on his chest, Frank soothed dry lips with the moisture on Matt’s throat. Quietly acknowledged, “Should’ve led with the part ‘bout it being a nun you met, Matty.” 

A frown tugged at the lines astride Matt’s eyes. “I didn’t think—“

“I got that, now.” Frank laid down a line of kisses on Matt’s shoulder. There was a freckle, a real, indelible one, beneath his mouth when he murmured, “You stop me.” 

Matt’s hand slid up, curved around Frank’s nape.

“Stop my breath, my goddamned heart, restart all of it again.”

Frank’s own name was pressed against his temple, humid and whole, a humbled whisper that—Frank moved into the shower, quicker than the thought that might’ve stopped him, urging Matt back, back until the long length of him was held between columns of wet tile and Frank’s fully clothed body. “Say it again, sweetheart. Like that.”

“Frank,” Matt breathed, and dipped his head, left the taste of that syllable on Frank’s lips. Wet, deft fingers freed button after button, tugged until Frank’s shirt was one more puddle on the floor. “Why? When I have this.”

Kneading Matt’s hip, holding on, restraint ran through Frank’s abdomen like a shiver, a residual tremor. “You could do—“ Frank hissed, angled his head to offer up still more of his skin to Matt’s teeth, to the merciless, branding pressure of his tongue. “_Fuck_,” he said, “Matty, you—“

“Made my choice.” Unmooring the button on Frank’s jeans, lowering the zipper, sliding his hand beneath the material to firmly circle Frank’s cock, Matt arched a darkly glistening eyebrow. “Remind me why?"

“This why you keep me around? For my—“

“Well,” Matt grinned, starting off with a slow, stroking pace, “as reasons go, it’s hard to ignore.”

A smile to match Matt’s took shape as Frank shook his head. Then, with a lick of laughter at the back of his mouth, slipping out in a single short, huffed burst of sound, Frank stepped in so close, Matt had no choice but to take back his hand, to spread his legs to accommodate Frank’s. Sliding his hands down to Matt’s ass, nails biting into that supple skin, Frank lifted him up, turned, and stepped over his discarded shirt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it! (One last thing: I'm not fond of keeping timelines, so please do fit this—and any other interlude I may write—into the series wherever you'd like.)
> 
> The title of this chapter and the lines Frank reads to Matt are from "You," a poem by Carol Ann Duffy.


	2. II. to where the dog roves in the shadows—ravenous, luminous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was late in seeing the post announcing Fratt Week, but with a prompt like ‘Dog’, well, I had to at least _try_ to start/finish a little something. While it’s not strictly necessary to have read the first fic in this series beforehand, it would probably be a boon to do so, if only because you might otherwise be at a loss regarding this Hugo character. Chapter title borrowed from Brian Barker’s "Dog Gospel.”

  
__

_This is how it is with love.  
Once invited,  
it steps in gently,  
circles twice,  
and takes up as much space  
as you will give it.  
_ \- Joyce Sidman, “Dog in Bed”

Beneath the bench, Frank rolled his ankle inside leather sittin’ snug against the bone. The boot laces were new, were wrapped tight enough ‘round the shaft to resist the stretch, the strain. The sound undercutting passing conversations, sets of tires on busted pavement, it came from about the same vicinity but had nothing to do with nylon cord on leather.

Lowering his sights from the group of kids poking around unmanned construction equipment across the street to Hugo, laid full out and taking up more than his fair share of limited sidewalk space, Frank heard it again: a gathering growl, thickened with an excess of saliva. He leaned to the side some, saw the slight, tense elevation of the dog’s head, how his lips had pulled back to reveal gums and glinting canines, and shifted to the bench’s far edge to scan the stretch of curb Hugo was intent on.

He looked through a knot of young women, bags dripping from hands and shoulders, ignored a man with a gray widow’s peak holding the hand of a little girl in a skirt that floated free as pollen around skinned knees. A young couple keeping their conversation between clinging lips listed to the left, partially obscuring a guy wearing black jeans, some scrap of black knit trailing from one pocket, and a black bomber bulging out a bit at his—

“It’s not enough he can do it,” Frank said, loosely winding Hugo’s leash around his wrist, his tracking stare pinned to the man’s advancing position, “Matt’s trainin’ you to sniff out guns now too?” 

On his feet, Frank squinted through the sun glare cutting across the coffee bar’s wide window, pinpointed Matt’s table. The client leaning so far over it the tip of her tie lapped at the saucer-sized mug cupped in both of her slim, unadorned hands. Quick as Frank found him, Matt’s shoulders relaxed. His nod might’ve been for the woman, an answer when she seemed unwilling to let him get in a word, but Frank knew that the shape of his man’s mouth and his silences maintained a similar language, and right then its slant was lazy, lopsided. Permissive.

“Hugo’s with me.”

Headed for the deli cornered by the end of the sidewalk, the dog paced him, huffed when little fingers reached out and skidded along his side. Caught his tail mid-swing and tugged before the kid’s mom realized, her reed-green eyes broadcasting apology. Frank offered the woman a smile, said, “It’s all good, no harm done,” without breaking stride.

He passed beneath a sun-bleached and wind-torn awning, through a door dressed in hours of operation, faded flyers for youth choirs and foosball tournaments, a silenced string of tarnished bells. 

An older man uniformed in hat and apron stood behind the deli’s display case, another man and two women ranged in front of the glass. Down one aisle, a few teenaged boys tugging on backpack straps, the row of dull black buttons on their blazers, seemed to be debating the merits of bagged jerky over the stuff in canisters. Half a dozen other people roamed through the place, narrowly focused on prickle-skinned fruit and squat bottles of olive oil, whatever the fuck else they figured they needed to stock their home shelves. 

Coming up on a corner, Frank found his guy in a blindspot where wheezing freezer cases converged. Angling to shoot a furtive look up at one of three security mirrors, that black bomber he wore slid uneasily over the butt of a 9mm.

Hugo growled, tail lifting from neutral.

“I see him,” Frank murmured, turning to a stacked display of condensed milk, relieving it of a can, “stand down.”

He let the leash slip, spiral to the split linoleum, and glanced at the can’s white label. Took in a few of the numbers, the net weight. Hugo stood beside him, as still as Frank’s shadow would’ve been if the light hadn’t been shit, if there weren’t so many sale-announcing posters barring the sun’s way in through the windows.

“Sir?”

Frank read her name tag—Bethany—before her face: conflicted lines around a painted-pink mouth, adoration in the eyes holding onto Hugo. “I was in a bit of a rush this morning, forgot his vest.”

The lines loosened to accommodate a relieved smile. “He’s a service dog.”

“Sure is,” Frank said, taking stock of Hugo’s crouched posture, the sharp swipes of his tail. “He’s not comfortable with anyone gettin’ too close, and I’m sorry to have to ask, but if you could go back behind the—“

Bethany’s eyes widened. She choked on a gasp, or a word, taking an unsteady step away as Frank sought out the scene playing at his back in the other mirrors. The guy hadn’t bothered with the balaclava, that bit of black still wilting over a pocket, but the gun, that was in his hand. Extended towards the lanky kid showing off both bare palms, held high above the register.

“This place got a back door?” Frank quietly asked Bethany, who nodded, shock-slow. “Point to where he’d need to go.”

Frank followed her finger, clocked the short distance between the guy with the white-knuckled grip on the gun and the cluttered path that would get him out of there quick. Frank stepped forward, Hugo doing the same beside him. “Hey,” he said, his voice even and pitched to carry, “you don’t want to do this.”

The black barrel swung around. “Stay there.”

Adjusting his grip on the can of milk, Frank lifted both arms. The halves of his unbuttoned shirt separated to reveal a cordon of scars along his collarbones, a lack of weapons at his waist. The ribbed tank beneath his flannel pulled across his belly, fitted as it was to suit the honed taper of Matt’s torso. 

“I’ll do that,” Frank nodded, took another step shadowed by the dog, “if you put the gun down and go, get outta here.” 

The guy’s gaze combed through the people caught out in the open. Taking a headcount, Frank thought, and going by the lung-deep breath he pulled in, not caring for the sum. From one of the bomber’s pockets, he pulled out a black plastic shopping bag. His head angled towards the kid manning the till, he rattled the bag. “Fill it.”

“My partner,” Frank said and there was no denying the taser-like effect of those two words, how the guy’s arm jerked and wavered before that elbow locked into place like a sealed deal, “he’s—“

“You a cop?”

Frank snorted. “I look like one?” He heard Hugo snarl, felt the dog’s tension as a vibration against his leg as the guy came closer, maybe searching out the impression of a badge, wary of a Glock tucked out of sight against the small of Frank’s back. The guy opened his mouth; Frank thought it likely an order to turn around would follow. 

He cut that off with an easy smile. “My partner, meaning the man I’m gonna spend the rest of my days with, he’d probably be real fucking worried—pissed, too—if he knew what I’ve gotten myself and our dog into here. Don’t suppose you’d let me use a phone, huh, so I can tell him not to be?”

“You keep talking and get yourself shot,” the guy’s trigger finger spasmed, skin rasping over steel, “it—“

Hugo’s snapping growl bit clear through the rest of the warning. Untethered, the dog lunged forward, mouth open and flashing saliva-slick teeth. Well within the second of silence between heartbeats, Hugo had latched onto the meat of the guy’s forearm.

Frank registered a few stumbling, backwards steps, the guy yanking to free his arm, repeatedly kicking out at the dog. He heard the shot. The high-pitched yelp that shattered on impact with the air and became a volley of echoes that did the kind of damage common to a round of bullets, shredding Frank’s awareness of place, tunneling his vision till it held one thing. One goddamned face.

His shout rough, throbbing, Frank launched the can in his right hand at the fucker’s head. The metal drew blood above one eye, and that blot of violent color, it was the only thing Frank focused on as his shoulder slammed into sternum and they both went down.

“We lose him ‘cause of you,” Frank grit out, plowing both fists into temples, ears, armpits, his blood-coated knuckles kindling, burning hotter than lit coals, “you’re done. Hear me? I’ll end—“

“Frank.”

His name in that voice—familiar as a pair of sure, strong hands; the arch of a spine as resilient and unwavering as grace—halted Frank's fist. Drew him up, pulled him back some, until the raw and swollen sight of his handiwork was in full, plain view. The guy was out cold, his head framed by riotous flecks and fat drops of drying splatter. 

On his knees, Frank stared down at a stain on a square of linoleum a foot or so ahead of his position, a stain that had not a goddamned thing to do with him. He licked his lips. Tasted cold, wet metal. "Matty," he rasped. "Hugo, is he—" A blunt-headed nudge against his back did something to Frank's lungs, made his next breath stall there, stay there. Turned a question into a bruised plea. “Matty?"

Beside him, Matt was suddenly beside him, down on his haunches. "I need you to look at the leg he's favoring." He reached for Frank's left hand with his right, swiped his thumb across the knuckles, taking some of the blood on his own skin. "After you show him you're not hurt. His heart rate is higher than I'd like it to be."

The wrenched muscles in Frank's stomach loosened. He turned his head, frowned when he found Matt's eyes unshielded, the glasses he'd pushed up the bridge of his nose that morning gone. A fast, searching look failed to locate Matt's cane, his briefcase. "Where's—" 

Hugo haltingly nosed in between them, long flyaway strands and the dog's bulk blurring Frank's narrowed study of Matt's mouth, the brackets of strain around either side of it. A gust of hot, moist air passed over his cheek, his jaw, as Hugo lowered his head, waited on Frank's hand. 

Frank managed a hitched, "Christ," before reaching over, easing his fingers into the soft, clinging fur at Hugo's neck. "He's bad as you are with the hero bullshit.”

"You came in here for a reason," Matt said. "I think that makes him ours." His head tipping towards the door, intent on the noisy sidewalk and car-choked street beyond, Matt's brow abruptly creased. "We need to go. Now.”

"There's a back exit." Frank unclipped Hugo's leash, handed it to Matt as they both moved to stand. Hauling their unresisting dog up into his arms, Frank firmed an awkward grip and followed Matt along the path someone had cut through boxes of unpacked deliveries and broken circular cutters on the floor behind the counter. "You leave your glasses and shit back at the—“

"My briefcase and a confused client. I'll go back for one of them later." Matt pulled his glasses from the inside pocket of his jacket, slid them into place. "Believe it or not, a blind man sprinting through traffic unassisted is conspicuous even in this city." Outside, in the narrow alleyway clutched between two brick-backed buildings, Matt steered Frank towards a rusted and sagging fire escape reaching up to the rooftop. "He should be able to—“

Grunting, Frank repositioned Hugo. Tested their combined weight on metal stairs that groaned but didn't give, and began to climb. When he reached the top, breathing nearly as heavily as the dog was panting, Frank walked towards the center of the roof and the HVAC unit stationed there. It took maneuvering: sitting without letting go of Hugo. Listening to a few quiet, pained whines without putting a fist through the metal at his back. "Which leg?”

"Back right." Matt sat down next to Frank, his hand immediately going for Hugo's face, the warmth beneath a folded-over ear. Hugo leaned into the comfort of that touch, closed his dark eyes. Let Frank examine the leg. "At least one rib is broken. His heart rate is still elevated but coming down."

"That piece of shit was kicking him before I...I should’ve—"

"This isn't on you, Frank. You couldn't have—“

Frank chewed his way through a laugh. "You of all fucking people are gonna try to feed me that bullshit, huh?" He stared at twin rounds of red polycarbonate, saw his own face, the blood and bull-flare of his nostrils. "You even know where to start digging to get yourself clear of all that guilt you take on, Matt? You finally figure out how to shovel it all into a confessional booth and walk away?”

Matt's fingers suspended their scratching, shoulders locking into a stillness so solid, so substantial, Frank might've gone to ground, gone too deep in some cave. Eyes closing, he tried to top up his lungs, tried to sift through leaked coolant and pigeon shit to find the arid smell of long-roasted coffee on Matt's collar, the dirt and dog park grass stuck to the coarse pads on Hugo's paws. Looked for a way to double back, a passage out of the fucking cave. 

By the time his lashes cleared his sightline, Matt was moving again, lowering his hand to Hugo's throat to rub beneath the collar there. "You can go, Frank," he said. "The officers on scene were given clearer descriptions of Hugo than of you. I'll stay here with him, wait them out.”

"I got him up here, I'll get him down. We should take him to—“

Matt nodded sharply. ”I will. Once you take off—”

"For Christ's sake, Matt, I—" Frank swallowed, splayed a hand over Hugo’s side, the dog’s heart beating in his palm. "When I heard Hugo yelp like that, it scared the shit outta me, Matty. Coming right after that fucking shot, and I couldn’t see him to know if he’d been—It was me and the fucker with the gun, that’s it. Hugo coulda been gone, or bleeding out, and—“

“There wasn’t anything you could do.”

“I could’ve kept my ass on the goddamn bench.”

“You could’ve,” Matt agreed, “but then we’d be having a similar conversation in a different location. If someone in that store had been injured, or died, because you let it go—“

“Fuck that.” Frank forced it out, the thought like a splinter in his head: “If I got your dog killed, you sayin’ you’d still want to be with me?”

The line of Matt’s lips softened. “Our dog.” He tipped his forehead against Frank’s temple, put his hand over Frank’s on Hugo. “If it came to it, do you think I’d want to mourn him on my own, Frank?”

Maybe to remind them both he was still there, Hugo squirmed. Shifted on Frank’s lap. Vocalized something that didn’t seem to indicate pain, or discomfort, but demanded attention all the same. Quick to supply it, Matt leaned back, produced a bottle of water from his jacket’s side pocket.

“Where the fuck did that come from?”

Uncapping the bottle, Matt offered up its open mouth to Hugo’s tongue. “The store.”

“The store I just stopped a guy from robbing?”

His man’s mouth, Frank watched it twitch, curve on the sly. “Yup.”

A snort, a huff of laughter that was one hundred percent amusement, preceded Frank getting an arm around Matt. And with Hugo’s sloppy lapping, at least half the bottle of water on his sleeve. “Case you weren’t aware, stealing’s a sin, Murdock,” he said. “Guess your penance will have to be carrying this beast of ours back down all those stairs.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks for reading and happy Fratt Week!


	3. III. Let Faith Be My Shield

_From the castle of darkness, the power of truth_

Trailing Matt to the last of the park’s unoccupied benches, Frank sat and stretched out his legs, bent his knees to put a steeple of shade over Hugo’s sun-warmed back. Eight feet ahead of his cooling heels, beneath vaulted branches, a group of eleven boys stood in a curved line. A woman buttoned into wool thick as oatmeal moved from one fidgeting kid to the next, fixing faded and folded polo collars, confiscating headphones and half-eaten packages of chips and candy.

After she’d passed by him, one of the boys fished out a pack of gum from a back pocket. With a prison-precise hand-off, he gave the kid next to him a mangled stick in a shade of bubbling red.

Frank snorted, knocked his boot’s toecap against Matt’s dress shoe. “Sit down.”

A muscle at Matt’s jaw leapt at the order, the same muscle Hugo had made a fuss over that morning, licking and licking at that strip of stubbled skin while Matt clipped leash to collar. Frank had thumbed off the residue, opted for Matt’s lips and a kiss like a struck match over a pilot light.

As it had been then, in the supine sunlight stretching into their kitchen, Matt’s focus was fixed. Only the angle of his head was different: turned away from Frank, aimed at the far right side of the line and what was likely the group’s youngest member. The boy had ducked his dark head over a small, shaking hand; every ounce of his attention seemed wrapped up in winding a white thread around a thumb that’d been roughly worked over by a couple of incisors.

Standing still, Matt righted his glasses’ off-center slant. The metal bridge wasn’t near thick enough to cover the line cutting deep as doubt through the skin underneath.

“Sit down, Matt.”

The dog shuffled out a snore while Matt chewed on the sharp, repeated command. A few seconds flush with birdsong and bursts of laughter ricocheting off the nearby set of monkey bars passed before Matt got around to swallowing it and sat. Strictly leaning against the slope of a rust-flecked armrest, the hand on his thigh contracted, began its inexorable curl.

Frank sighed, reached over and snagged Matt’s fist-prone fingers. He lowered their joined hands to the bench’s warped slats, a sizable knot obscuring a smattering of unnatural notches in the wood, and squeezed. “I take it that’s not Maggie.”

Matt’s nostrils flared. “Sister Josephine.” His thumb ascended one of Frank’s folded knuckles to its peak and circled, circled that bone like a boulder, until it found a bluntness, a reasonable pitch, to balance on. “Grapefruit and nicotine, neither of which she ingests. She also hasn’t gotten around to removing the thumbtack from the sole of her shoe.” 

“Few days back, I overheard somethin’ about a precinct looking to add to its canine unit,” Frank said, settling in, hip to hip, “if you’re interested.”

An unsounded laugh snarled Matt’s mouth. “If you like the couch that much, you could’ve said something sooner. I’ve got an extra set of sheets.“

“You’re getting real comfortable with empty threats, Matty. Might want to watch that.”

“I’ll keep an eye on it.”

Frank’s smile crept in on its belly, slow enough to read as begrudging, but he had no doubt Matt was aware of its eventual arrival. “You’re fucking lucky I put up with that shit, you know that, right?” He pinned Hugo’s leash beneath his thigh, lingered a second or two in eddies of laughter—Matt’s, a warm ripple of sound softer than the snickering coming in waves from a few of the choir boys—and the echoes of delighted screams sliding over from the playground.

Sister Josephine tugged on a cord coiled between an older model keyboard and portable speaker. Frank watched the youngest of the boys shuffle closer. Hold out that small, shaking hand in a silent offer of willing service. 

Blinking—once, twice—Frank asked, “They always practice in public?”

“Occasionally. Maggie thinks it helps them get their nerves under control.”

The kid knelt to connect the two pieces of equipment. Job done, he stood and swiped at his creased chinos, both knees, before reaching up to his cheeks, dusting at all his freckles like he might be rid of them as easily as the dirt. Giving it up as no good, pocketing his hands, the boy lifted his head.

Lifted long, long lashes.

The eyes that latched onto Frank weren’t brown or green. They were big, wide, with this gleam like a fresh coat of varnish on a carousel horse’s flank, on the solid ribcage that swelled around nothin’ more than the innate knowledge of a pumping heart. Bold as anything, they took in Frank’s busted nose and beard; the blank t-shirt, black threads sweat-soldered to the scars beneath; the hand gripping his—

“Frank?”

He figured his expression must’ve twitched or contorted, had done something similar to a flag flicking across the sun’s path, that glitch of light on the pavement. Whatever it was, witnessing it, the boy frowned. Rabbit-fast, those eyes that weren’t Maria’s, or Matt’s, but an unlikely mix of both, lowered to the dog at Frank’s feet. They skidded over Hugo from crown to tail, over and again, like the comforting pass of a palm over familiar, thickly furred terrain.

Another heavy second of radio silence passed before Matt disengaged his hand. He turned on the bench, and his suit-coated shoulders, their world-holding width, greyed out some of the scene at his back: moms and dads and slyly smiling young girls, families that’d come to the park to share packed lunches. To make a memory like the scent of some flower crowding a goddamn bush: strong, then distant, then gone.

“Frank,” Matt offered, “we don’t—“

“You wanted to come down here, to give these kids an audience,” Frank said, “so that’s what we’re gonna do.” Shifting over on the bench, glancing down at a string of initials carved into the wood alongside a poorly formed heart cleaved in half by what was meant to be an arrow, probably, but looked more like bullets fired along the same trajectory, Frank inhaled. Exhaled. “All right?”

Resignation pinned down one side of Matt’s mouth. “All right.”

Frank nodded and slipped the loop of Hugo’s leash from his wrist, turned the slack into a tourniquet around his thigh. Pulled it tight. Pulled it tighter, until the strip of nylon numbed his leg and cut through his merry-go-round thoughts and—“Talk, would you,” Frank swallowed, loud, louder than the swoop of birds scrambling for scraps, “about…whatever, Matt, just…”

Quiet but clear, unhesitating, Matt said, “I used to sing. Not in a choir, nothing like that. More like when my dad stayed late at the gym. Sometimes after he got home from a fight and fell asleep, and I couldn’t do the same. It wasn’t—I wouldn’t say I was any good.” Matt stopped, laughed. The sound slipped inside Frank like a suture. “Probably I wasn’t even passable.”

“What—” The word stuck to the roof of Frank’s mouth, came out like an asthmatic breath. He shifted back over, covered old initials, the damaged heart, leaning slightly against Matt. “What songs?”

“Whatever I heard on the radio at the time. Or at church.” Matt’s lips twitched before he grinned outright, before he said, “There was this one hymn I loved, that I sang all the time, because I was a kid and it was about a knight riding into battle against dragons and ogres. And he did that, he fought, without a sword. He had his faith, and he won.” 

Matt laughed again—and again Frank didn’t feel the needle, only knew another suture had been applied somewhere out of sight. Matt shrugged, adding, “I might have internalized it.” 

“A song about a guy who fights monsters with his faith and fists?” Frank shook his head, retaking Matt’s hand, sliding scar against callus, holding skin to skin. “Sounds not a goddamned thing like you.”

“Maybe not,” Matt conceded with a smile, “considering how quick you’ve been to point out how rarely I win.”

“Since fucking when do you listen to me?”

“From the start. Granted, for awhile there that was mostly because you seemed to think I shouldn’t have another choice.” With his head again turned to the right, his thumb finding the same boulder to climb, Matt appeared to approach a stray thought with caution. When he finally gave it a voice, when he said, “But I _heard_ you, every word, that night in the cemetery,” it was low enough to let Frank decide whether or not Matt had said anything at all.

To give Frank room to react accordingly, and that—

“You don’t bring it up much. You growing up. Your dad.” Frank looked at the boy. Looked at slight, straight shoulders, the mole on the exposed handspan of his throat, before clocking that the kid was looking right back. “When I talked about them back then, before I said a thing, you had carried my ass how far? You know what shape I was in, could probably tick off every one of my injuries. I guess the pain, for a while, okay, for those few minutes, it was distributed enough to make saying their names possible.”

Tightening his grip, Frank moved their hands onto his lap. “Those memories, they were so sharp it was fuckin’ unreal, and I don’t know, maybe I had to pull ‘em out right then and there. Maybe I knew you’d hold onto them. Maybe I knew that if and when you brought ‘em out again, it’d have nothing to do with causin’ some kind of harm, you wouldn’t be doing it to cut me. Shit, Matt, maybe I even knew that if I went and stabbed my goddamned self with them, you wouldn’t let me bleed out.”

Frank paused to breathe, to try on something like a smile, something soft, or at least something softer than his sum, so the kid knew it was okay, that he didn’t have to look away.

The smile Frank got in return was this small, tentative thing, but, Christ, it brightened those big, bold eyes that much more.

With his heart going at his ribs like a little boy’s heels kicking at a horse’s varnished flank, so damn eager to be let out of the gate, to maybe have another go ‘round, Frank managed to murmur, “I wasn’t wrong. Not about that.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The hymn Matt refers to is “When a Knight Won His Spurs” (full text below). I was trying to find an in with one of the Frattweek prompts, and kept circling ‘faith’, jotting down things along the lines of the etymology of _lapse_, and single words—rosary, pyrrhic, sacrum—and then, at the bottom of the page, I tacked on ‘St. George/Dragon’. (I think often enough of Carlo Crivelli’s “Saint George Slaying the Dragon,” a canvas so resplendent with gold the paint is practically molten, and it could’ve been that it was at the back of my mind just then.) That notation recalled an article I’d read a while ago that was concerned with variations on Saint George’s story, and that article led me to the hymn, which led to this scene. [Here’s but one rendition of the song](https://youtu.be/LryMk3cnXGI), in case you want to have a listen and imagine little Matty alternately humming and singing it while waiting for Jack to come home. As ever, thank you for reading! Comments are kept close & held dear.
> 
> “When a knight won his spurs in the stories of old  
He was gentle and brave, he was gallant and bold  
With a shield on his arm and a lance in his hand  
For God and for valour, he rode through the land
> 
> No charger have I, and no sword by my side  
Yet still to adventure and battle I ride  
Though back into storyland giants have fled  
And the knights are no more and the dragons are dead
> 
> Let faith be my shield and let joy be my steed  
'Gainst the dragons of anger, the ogres of greed  
And let me set free with the sword of my youth  
From the castle of darkness, the power of truth”


End file.
